"I'm growing so vain! you will quite spoil me, Mr. Longcluse."
"Truth will never spoil any one. Praise is very delightful. I have not had much of it in my day, but I think it makes one better as well as happier; and to speak simple truth of you, Miss Arden, is inevitably to praise you."
"Those are compliments, Mr. Longcluse, and they bewilder me--anything one does not know how to answer; so I would rather you pointed me out four or five faults in my drawing, and I should be very well content if you said no more. I believe you know the scenery of Golden Friars."
"I do. Beautiful, and so romantic, and full of legends! the whole place with its belongings is a poem."
"So I think. And the hotel--the inn I prefer calling it--the 'George and Dragon,' is so picturesque and delightfully old, and so comfortable! Our head-quarters were there for two or three weeks. And did you see Childe Waylin's Leap?"
"Yes, an awful scene; what a terrible precipice! I saw it to great advantage from a boat, while a thunderstorm was glaring and pealing over its summit. You know the legend, of course?"
"Oh, it is a very striking one, and won't take many words to tell. Shall I tell it?"
"Pray do," said Alice, with her bright look of expectation.
He smiled sadly. Perhaps the story returned with an allegoric melancholy to his mind. With a sigh and a smile he continued--
"Childe Waylin fell in love with a phantom lady, and walked day and night along the fells--people thought in solitude, really lured on by the beautiful apparition, which, as his love increased, grew less frequent, more distant and fainter, until at last, in the despair of his wild pursuit, he threw himself over that terrible precipice, and so perished. I have faith in instinct--faith in passion, which is but a form of instinct. I am sure he did wisely."
"I sha'n't dispute it; it is not a case likely to happen often. These phantom ladies seem to have given up practice of late years, or else people have become proof against their wiles, and neither follow, nor adore, nor lament them."
"I don't think these phantom ladies are at all out of date," said Mr. Longcluse.
"Well, men have grown wiser, at all events."
"No wiser, no happier; in such a case there is no room for what the world calls wisdom. Passion is absolute, and as for happiness, that or despair hangs on the turn of a die."